Welcome to Survival of the Fittest, a RPing board loosely based off of Koshun Takami's Battle Royale, with its own unique plot and spin on the 'deadly game'. We've been around quite a while, and are now in our thirteenth year, so don't worry about us going anywhere any time soon!

If you're a newcomer and interested in joining, then please make sure you check out the rules. You may also want to read the FAQ, introduce yourself and stop by the chat to meet some of our members. If you're still not quite sure where to start, then we have a great New Member's Guide with a lot of useful information about getting going. Don't hesitate to PM a member of staff (they have purple usernames) if you have any questions about SOTF and how to get started!

Alright folks, gimme your characters. Post here and I shall read and review (be that review one sentence or one hundred) the first five in a disorganized and haphazard fashion that likely won't be much use to you. One handler per character, plz. POST NOW, MULES!

16:57 KamiKaze Laurie, if you ever become a mod, let it be known that one day you will critique someone's profile who had a girl killing her family friend because he raped her, and the person will insult you by calling you a talking Oshawott doll.

21:42Acidic i AM ANAL WART MAN

00:19Delroy.... I HAVE AN IMAGE OF HANSEL FUCKING TRAVIS WITH A CHAINSAW STUCK IN MY HEAD. HOW IS THIS IN ANY WAY GOOD!?

Katja Lawson: I'm lucky that wasn't more awkward.Toby Underwood: Does this call for a pun? Trick question.Paloma Salt: Who do you think you are?Carmen Garcia-Gomez: Let's keep going, don't stop tonight!

V5Daniel Whitten: BOY 074, armed with an INDIANA JONES REPLICA WHIP. "Oh, hey, sorry. Didn't think there was anyone else-" Died early.Alice Gilman: GIRL 064, armed with a ROTATO. "Just... Just wanted you to drop the gun. Thought you were gonna shoot." Died stupidly.Michael Mitchellson:BOY 019, armed with a FUCKING AUTOMATIC SHOTGUN. Died a failure.

OK, so Timothy starts out the game by meeting up with Michael and Rachael, and they all bond together as horrible nerds (alongside Corey, who I kinda like as the obvious outsider of the group). Timothy's first couple threads were kind of a slog to read. As a character, he comes of as being spergy and a bit annoying, and his dialogue feels stunted. This isn't helped by the fact they they all immediately dive into that old chestnut of a SOTF plotline: "let's look for Friend X!", which, as I think I've written about before, is pretty much the most overused plotline in board history. The obvious twist in the tale comes with Michael's deafness, though, and that might be worth something.

Ah, but thankfully, Friend Daniel ends up dead on day 1, and that improved things immensely. Timothy introducing the idea of lying to Michael about Daniel's death is a new wrinkle that I don't think has ever been explored in SOTF, and while I don't think it's a strong enough narrative hook to support an entire beginning-to-end SOTF story, I'm looking forward to what it leads to. More stuff needs to be introduced to keep me reading Timothy in the future, but I do think that both his character and story have gotten a lot better over the past couple threads.

Character-wise, as I read along I get like a faint sense of nostalgia when I read Timothy, a theme of his thinking of things as they used to be, wishing that they could all be back at Disneyland or at school, that sort of thing, and that ties into his character as a whole -- someone whose driving needs are safety and security. That's a good thing, because a security-oriented character like Timothy can come off as incredibly flat and dull, so my advice would be to keep pressure on him, keep forcing him into situations like lying to protect his friend, and don't let him just fade into the background as "just another guy". He's always in danger of doing that, of having post after post where he merely reacts and states facts in a monotone.

Like Timothy, one of the things that stuck with me about Claire is that both her character and her story are much improved in her last couple threads as opposed to her first couple. That's obviously a natural extension of both the handler finding their footing in writing the character and the character finding a storyline and goal that's not "wandering around aimlessly", but it's still good to see happen. Because threads like Wisteria Lane, featuring characters and groups staring at, calling out to, or pointing weapons at each other before going their separate ways, are just awful and pointless, even if through no fault of the handlers themselves.

Now, as far as Claire herself goes, as I started out reading her I found myself nearly buried in an avalanche of italicthoughts and references, and that's not a good thing. Again, this got better as I went on, but my biggest advice would be to really think before using either of those. I mean, of course Claire is the filmmaker girl. That's great. But for every reference that makes the reader go "buh?", that's something that keeps us from connecting with her as a character. What are the babies from Uzumaki? Who the hell is Doctor Orpheus? Beats me. Now, references can work even if they're not understood (Claire has a long rambling thought section after the first announcement that's more about her panicking than about the various references she makes at one point, for example), but they shouldn't be popping up twice in every post. And italicthoughts work much the same way. They're like an invisible wall that keeps the character at a distance from us. Since we're already reading them from a perspective that lets us know their thoughts, they're often unnecessary. Most of them can probably be bettered simply by changing "I", "my" and "our" to "She/Claire", "our", and "their", and getting rid of the italics completely.

On to the good things, like I said above, I finally started getting a real sense of who Claire was once she got the hell away from Wisteria Lane and into the hospital. I got a feel for how overwhelmed she felt by everything, and it was one case where the italicthoughts actually worked. I wasn't sure how much the plotline of burying bodies fit her character, but it actually does make sense seeing as how it wasn't her idea, and she only agreed to it because it gave her some sort of goal to work towards, some sense of accomplishment that she'd been looking to find since she first woke up. I don't know how well it'll work out for her in the end, but it makes me at least somewhat interested in finding out. And as Claire discovers, burying bodies isn't exactly a walk in the park. Her dialogue does come off as being too on-the-nose at times, but it's not bad; it certainly can be worked with.

Again, in getting a sense of Claire over her last couple threads, my advice going forward is to keep that up and give us more. Get your hooks into her and let her bleed all over the screen rather than using italics and passive tense to keep her at a distance. There's a lot of potential in her as a character.

[21:51] Zarina: "and then Naft rode Aloha's large purple crab all night long, in a hypothetical future where Aloha is at the age of consent" [21:51] Zarina: the end

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[19:06] Aloha: Oh jeez one of my ACNL villagers gave me a shirt they were just wearing[19:06] Aloha: warning me that it was "still warm"...[19:09] Aloha: My other ACNL villager just gave me his toilet w h a t[19:09] Skraal: "It's still warm"

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[00:15] Zarina: I think we're pretty lighthearted for a bunch of people writing about mass murder

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Kyoko Sakura-chan - Today at 5:01 PMIn Hawaiian, Aloha means "Hello" and "Goodbye," the latter of which is appropriate considering how fast his V6 cast died